The image loader or also known internally as Ldr, is responsible for most of the initialization work of a user-mode process and resides in the user-mode system DLL (Ntdll.dll) and not in the kernel library. The image loader can perform some of the following tasks: Initializing the user-mode state for the application. Parsing the import table (IAT) of the application to find all the DLL files that the program requires. Loading and unloading DLLs at runtime/memory. Handling manifest files, needed for SxS support. Enabling support for API Sets and API redirection.